test, mysql, mariadb, travis, continuous integration, before_install

In case your projects make use of external databases like MySQL/MariaDB you need to setup your continuous integration tests with dedicated testcases including application specific database structures. This requires some initial steps to load the database dump before starting the tests. Thanks to travisci.org you do’t need to do this kind of stuff within your application – just use the test configuration!

First of all, we add MySQL Server as service within our .travis.yml file. This initializes a dedicated database instance for testing. Additionally we hook into the before_install action to initialize our database structure. In this example all SQL commands are loaded from an external file located in our test directory.

Our Test Database structure is definied within a dedicated SQL file in test/travis.sql. It contains all necessary commands to add a new user, create demo database, create demo tables and finally add some test-data.